Investors Need To Cool It on Sprint-T-Mobile Speculation, Analysts Say

Investors are getting excited about a possible merger between wireless carriers Sprint and T-Mobile after President-elect Trump takes office and presumably appoints some pro-merger regulators. But analysts are warning that the excitement may be running ahead of reality.

Shares of Sprint had already gained 30% since the election last month before jumping another 9% on Wednesday on news of a meeting between Trump and Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank Group, which owns a majority stake in the carrier. Shares of T-Mobile have gained 16% in total since the election, including a 4% gain on Wednesday.

The rally is based on the idea that while regulators appointed by President Obama opposed a Sprint-T-Mobile merger, Trump appointees would allow such a deal even though it would reduce the number of major wireless carriers from four to three. Trump has already appointed three advocates of deregulation to oversee his transition at the Federal Communications Commission and a pro-merger lawyer for the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

The problem is that since initial rumors of a deal in 2013, T-Mobile tmus has been gaining in value, while Sprint s remains somewhat troubled and over-leveraged, according to analyst Craig Moffett at MoffettNathanson Research.

Also, a deal would have a dramatic impact on the level of consolidation in the wireless market. The Justice Department typically relies on a measure of consolidation known as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. By the HHI, the wireless market is already moderately consolidated, but a Sprint-T-Mobile combo would send it through the roof, Moffett noted. The combined company would also own more spectrum licenses in some markets than the FCC permits.

“What all this does suggest is that finding common ground for a merger will be hard,” Moffett wrote in a report on Thursday. “And so too will getting a merger approved in Washington. We’re not saying it can’t be done, but we are saying that the odds being assigned to success are simply too high.”

Analyst Atul Goyal at Jefferies says the likelihood of Sprint buying T-Mobile has been “reduced” because of the ARM deal, while telecom analysts at Trefis think the growing price tag for T-Mobile, now trading at a market value of $48 billion, is beyond Sprint. “The chances are slim given T-Mobile’s high market cap and the presence of other potentiality deeper-pocketed bidder,” the analysts wrote on Wednesday.

For more on Softbank’s acquisition of ARM, watch:

Other possible bidders could include cable companies that are planning to offer wireless service next year, such as Comcastcmcsa and Charter Communicationschtr. “T-Mobile could be targeted by Comcast or Charter looking to match AT&T’s bundle,” William Power, at Baird Equity Research, wrote. Such a deal would not reduce competition in the wireless market by eliminating a major player and instead may be seen as strengthening the market.

Still, some analysts engaged in flights of fancy, imagining a massive restructuring of the telecom landscape under Trump. Sprint could merge with both T-Mobile and Dish Network dish “to create a discounted quad-play service company with over 300 MHz of spectrum,” Timothy Horan, at Oppenheimer & Co, writes. That in turn could lead Comcast and Verizonvz possibly to merge as well. AT&Tt then might buy parts of CenturyLinkctl, Frontier Communicationsftr or Windstreamwin, Horan wrote, inflating the greatest hopes and dreams of every investment banker on Wall Street.

T-Mobile Will Now Let Phone Numbers Ring on Any Mobile Device

T-Mobile famously disconnected mobile phones from two-year service contracts and then broke the link between phones and the cellular network with Wi-Fi calling. On Wednesday, the pioneering carrier announced a beta project to go even deeper, separating phones from phone numbers.

Dubbed Digits, the new project in some ways resembles services from Googlegoogl, Skype msft, and others that allow users to make and receive calls on multiple devices with one number. But T-Mobile’s solution, which will be rolled out to all customers early next year, uses the core phone network and doesn’t rely on workarounds that mess up caller ID and other telephony functions.

Beta testers will be able to assign their T-Mobile number on up to five devices—including phones, tablets and personal computers—to make and receive calls and texts. Users will also be able to assign up to five numbers to any one device. And those devices don’t have to be on T-Mobile’s network–users can assign their Digits numbers to phones getting service from Verizonvz, Sprint s, or AT&Tt. Everything will be controlled from the “My T-Mobile” section of T-Mobile’s web site, and eventually via a related app.

T-Mobile tmus customers can sign up for the beta test starting on Wednesday. During the test the service will be free, but some fee is likely once Digits is available to all T-Mobile customers, T-Mobile chief operating officer Mike Sievert tells Fortune.

“Expect it will be simple and it will be disruptive,” Sievert says without giving away the details.

T-Mobile, the nation’s third-largest carrier, has gained a reputation for bucking industry conventions under CEO John Legere. So far Legere’s “un-carrier” strategy has worked, as the company has doubled its customer base and nearly quadrupled its stock price. Lately, that success prompted a host of M&A speculation that other wireless companies, cable companies, or even big tech companies might want to buy T-Mobile from majority-owner Deutsche Telekom.

With the Digits project, the separation of phone numbers from physical devices means that call histories, voice mails, past text messages, and contact lists can be accessed from anywhere as well. That may come in handy for businesses that want to assign numbers to employees’ mobile phones and have them access contact lists without giving up control of the data, Sievert says.

Digits also breaks the connection between a phone number and the SIM card in a phone, making it much easier to have multiple phones on one account. That could prompt people to use a greater diversity of phone form factors, Sievert thinks. “You could have different devices for different aspects of your lifestyle,” he says. “This is my itty bitty phone for nights out on the town. This is my waterproof phone for the beach.”

Still, that vision may be a stretch in an age when calling—and increasingly even texting—have been overtaken by more app-based communications platforms like Snapchat, Instagram fb, and WhatsApp.

And T-Mobile says it had to re-engineer its calling and identity management systems, with multiple pending patents covering the technology. So the company is unlikely to be sharing the technology with other carriers.

“There are a ton of patents around this,” T-Mobile chief technology officer Neville Ray tells Fortune. “I’m not saying others couldn’t do it. It’s going to take them some time.”

That may give T-Mobile an advantage in wooing customers, but it also prevents the notion of unconnected numbers and devices from becoming ubiquitous.

The goal was to create a simple service and hide the technological reshuffling of core telephone systems “There’s a lot of technology behind the scenes that we are not asking the customer to solve or manage,” Ray explains.

For a look at one of Legere’s early marketing efforts at T-Mobile, watch:

On most devices, Digits users will have to make calls and texts with an app or via a web browser. Only Samsung’s Galaxy S6, S7, and Note 5 devices have native support for Digits built into the phone dialing software, though T-Mobile said it is working to add that level of integration to other manufacturers phones.

One potential hitch in the early going is that Digits is not compatible with Apple’s aapl popular iMessage network for text messaging. A Digits user with an iPhone or iPad would have to turn off iMessage functionality to get all of the T-Mobile features, such as the synched texting history on every device. T-Mobile is talking to Appleaapl about adding full compatibility with iMessage as well as iPhone dialer integration. Apple already mimics some of the Digits features via what it calls iCloud wi-fi calling.

Still, T-Mobile is pressing for greater integration with Digits. “We’d love to see it,” Sievert says. “These are very close partners of ours.”

Four Things to Know About SoftBank’s $50 Billion Promise

This article originally appeared in Term Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.

SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son is on Team Trump, and Trump is on Team SoftBank. On Tuesday, Son promised Trump he will invest $50 billion in the U.S. to create 50,000 jobs. A few thoughts:

This is not new money. It’s projected to come from SoftBank’s previously announced $100 billion tech investment fund, which is backed by Trump’s favorite country, Saudi Arabia.

SoftBank has not exactly been a job creator in the U.S. As BTIG telecom analyst Walt Piecyk points out, Sprint S has cut its headcount by 9,000 and reduced capital investment by 70% since SoftBank bought it three years ago.

Son says he likes Trump’s stance on deregulation. He likely means antitrust scrutiny, which killed SoftBank’s original plan to buy Sprint and merge it with T-Mobile TMUS. Sprint and Son still want to do that deal, even though T-Mobile’s stock has risen about 220% since 2013. But I’d have to imagine that merger would create more “synergies” than it would jobs.

Son has been a master of surprise lately (always? but especially lately). In 2015 he flirted with taking SoftBank private in what would be the largest management buyout ever (SoftBank’s astonishing $120 billion in debt notwithstanding). Then he announced plans to hand off his company to Nikesh Arora so he could retire. Then he changed his mind and within weeks, SoftBank was spending $32 billion on chipmaker ARM Holdings and creating a $100 billion tech investment fund. It’s fun to watch Son and SoftBank in action, but a roller-coaster for SoftBank shareholders investors.

Why Big Phone Companies Are Excited for the Trump Presidency

There’s a growing sense of almost euphoria in the telecommunications industry as the incoming Donald Trump administration appears likely to be considerably more friendly to mergers and acquisitions.

The change comes after eight years of tough regulatory scrutiny of telecom mergers under the Obama administration. AT&T wanted to buy T-Mobile, then Sprint s tried. Both were nixed by regulators, which also prevented Comcastcmcsa from grabbing Time Warner Cable twc.

But that hostility towards consolidation appears quite likely to change. President-elect Trump has appointed to his transition team a series of industry figures to govern both merger reviews and telecom policy, many of whom have displayed strong opposition to regulatory intervention and a preference for letting free markets evolve on their own.

The industry is expecting considerably more “openness for consolidation,” Braxton Carter, T-Mobile’s CFO, said at a UBS investor conference on Monday. “I really do think you’re going to see a lot of evolution and a lot of excitement of over the next several years.”

T-Mobile, having been twice before the subject of acquisition efforts, is among the most likely to merge in the new deregulatory climate. But as the carrier has doubled its subscriber base and become a cash generating machine over the past three years, the terms of the next deal may be quite different. Carter said his company expects M&A activity will include companies outside of the telecom business.

Still, it’s unclear if allowing such mega-mergers would help or harm consumers. After regulators stopped AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, the smaller carrier became a force for lowering prices and doing away with customer-unfriendly industry practices like two-year contracts.

Even without more mega-mergers, the telecom industry expects rapid relief on the regulatory front as well. Carter, like many others in the industry, expects the Trump administration will roll back net neutrality rules intended to prevent discrimination against any website or online service.

“There are a lot of very interesting things you could potentially do, but we’ll see what happens,” Carter said Monday without getting specific.

T-Mobile’s tmus innovations in giving customers unlimited data to watch streaming video or listen to streaming music didn’t discriminate and weren’t challenged on net neutrality grounds. By contrast, AT&T t and Verizon’s vz efforts to give their customers free data for using video services they own has come under fire from the Federal Communications Commission.

Big Telecom Union Targeting Wireless Workers in 2017

With the old line telephone business shrinking every year, the main union for telecommunications employees is renewing its efforts to organize more workers on the wireless side of the industry.

Hundreds of organizers for the Communications Workers of America union met with leaders in San Antonio this week to plot strategy for reaching more wireless workers. While workers in the old line telephone business were almost entirely in unions, only workers at AT&T, among the major wireless carriers, are highly unionized.

For 2017, the union hopes to make gains at Verizon and T-Mobile while seeking to slow AT&T’s use of unaffiliated partner stores, with non-union employees, to sell wireless service and phones. During the San Antonio conference, workers demonstrated in front of a Verizon wireless store and an authorized AT&T wireless retailer.

The conference comes after some 40,000 workers in Verizon’s old line phone and Internet businesses went on strike in April. After a seven-week strike, the workers ended up with better pay and job security than the company had offered before the walk out. The CWA also made tiny headway on the wireless side in that negotiation, getting workers at a few Verizon mobile stores included in the union.

Verizon vz noted that the CWA has been “overwhelmingly unsuccessful” in unionizing efforts among its wireless workforce. “While we respect the rights of our employees to consider these efforts, we’re quite confident that the vast majority of our workforce believes Verizon Wireless as a great place to work and will continue to reject union representation,” the company said in a statement to Fortune.

The conference included a panel of Verizon workers from across the company discussing the strike. Organizing Verizon workers is a “major CWA priority,” union president Chris Shelton told the attendees.

T-Mobile tmus workers also spoke in San Antonio. To boost momentum at T-Mobile, the third-largest wireless carrier, the union set up a new office this summer to improve outreach to call center employees in Kansas. Not enough workers have signed up at any work site to reach the 30% minimum needed to trigger a formal unionization election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

AT&T t has a major contract with the union covering wireless workers coming up for bargaining early next year. Though the union will push to limit jobs farmed out to wireless stores not owned by AT&T, the two sides have successfully reached agreement on 19 contracts in a row since the beginning of 2015. Last month, about 2,000 workers in AT&T’s wired Internet business approved a new three-year contract.

For more about the impact of the Verizon strike, watch:

AT&T noted that it is the largest employer of full-time union workers in the country. “We’re proud of our longstanding strong relationships with our unions,” the company said in a statement to Fortune. “We’ve always utilized a variety of distribution channels to provide a mix of options for our customers.”

Still, the CWA faces a number of serious obstacles to expanding in the wireless business, not the least of which is the companies’ strong efforts to fend them off. Also, the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump is likely to make pro-business appointments to the NLRB and Labor Department, which had aided unions under the Obama administration.

And the union push is coming just as growth in the wireless market has slowed and there is more pressure from Wall Street to cut costs.

Another Carrier Is Offering a Free iPhone 7 On Black Friday

Verizon matched one of T-Mobile’s most popular Black Friday offers, saying customers can get a free iPhone 7 by trading in of a recent smartphone.

As with T-Mobile, the free with trade-in offer also applies to other new flagship smartphones. Verizon included the Google Pixel and the Samsung Galaxy S7, among others. Customers must sign up for a 24-month installment plan, with Verizon covering the payment for the phone each month. A customer who stays with Verizon for less than the full two years wouldn’t get full credit for a phone.

Customers switching to Verizon from a competitor and who purchase a phone will get a $200 Visa prepaid card for each line they transfer, up to four lines, as well. And Verizon is offering discounts on an array of other accessories. The Black Friday offers will run through the weekend, Verizon said.

Wireless carriers are upping the ante on deals and promotions as the holiday shopping season gets going. The aim is to attract more customers in a market that is no longer expanding like it did a few years ago. Only T-Mobile tmus and Sprint added regular monthly phone customers recently, while Verizon and AT&T saw net losses in that most lucrative subscriber category.

Sprint s has said it will offer Black Friday customers who buy a Galaxy S7 phone a second S7 phone for free or a free Samsung Tab E tablet. The HTC Bolt phone will be half off, and customers who buy an LG V20 will get a free 43-inch LG 4K UHD Smart LED TV.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile have also offered discounts on service in addition to hardware promotions.

AT&T’s deals, which started on Tuesday, include a free iPhone 7, Galaxy S7, LG G5 or LG V20 only for customers of the company’s DirecTV or U-Verse services who switch a line in from a competitor. The carrier is also offering an assortment of discounts and deals on other hardware, such as a $200 Visa gift card with purchase of a Samsung Galaxy S6 phone or an LG G Pad X 10.1 tablet for 99 cents with purchase of a flagship LG phone and a two-year contract.

To learn about Verizon’s Yahoo purchase, watch:

When the iPhone 7 was first released, all four carriers offered a free with trade-in offers. T-Mobile and Sprint said the offers greatly increased demand compared to sales of last year’s iPhone 6s. AT&T t and Verizon vz said their deals only modestly affected demand.

Analysts think the promotions may have helped sell more iPhones than expected, but Apple won’t reveal actual iPhone sales until January, when it reports results for the final quarter of the year. Even then, the company never discloses how many iPhones were sold in the U.S.

T-Mobile Hit With Complaint Over Accounting and Disclosure Policies

T-Mobile was hit by an investor complaint on Wednesday, questioning some of its accounting and disclosure policies.

CtW Investment Group, a union-backed investor activism firm, said it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate T-Mobile’s reporting of non-standard accounting measures as well as the company’s policy for how its accounts for customers who default on phone installment payment plans.

T-Mobile, one of the only major telecommunications firms with a non-union workforce, did not have an immediate comment when contacted by Fortune.

In the eight-page complaint, CtW said that T-Mobile regularly cited non-standard financial results without completely detailing how to reconcile the figures with standard measures under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. The SEC allows companies to give investors non-standard metrics, but requires that the companies also detail exactly how the metrics differ from the closest GAAP measures.

In T-Mobile’s case, CtW said the company reported to investors a non-standard measure of cash flow called adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. In 2015, T-Mobile shifted some customers from phone installment payment plans to phone leases, a change which would have an impact on cash flow, but which was not detailed, CtW said. That left investors in the dark about part of the company’s financial situation, CtW said.

CtW also complained that T-Mobile tmus excluded amounts it spent to buy spectrum licenses when it reported its free cash flow, a measure which is supposed to indicate how much cash a company is producing after deducting current expenses and capital costs. Over the past three years, T-Mobile did not include in its free cash flow calculation $4.6 billion it spent for the licenses, CtW said, making its cash flow look significantly stronger.

Finally, CtW complained that T-Mobile in 2015 reduced the amount of money it set aside to cover future defaults on phone installment payment plans at a time when it should have been increasing the allowance. The change boosted T-Mobile’s net income, CtW said.

To learn about Comcast’s efforts to offer wireless service, watch:

“Despite the decrease in allowance for credit losses, all of the publicly available indicators of potential credit risk…implied that if anything, credit risk was increasing rather than declining,” CtW wrote.

In June, the SEC asked T-Mobile to provide more disclosure about its contacts with Syria and Sudan, two countries designated by the U.S. as state sponsors of terrorism, and the company complied. The agency said in a July 6 letter that it was satisfied with the Syria and Sudan disclosures and did not ask about any other of T-Mobile’s accounting or disclosure policies.

This Carrier Is Bringing Back Its Free iPhone 7 Deal for Black Friday

T-Mobile is reviving its popular free iPhone 7 deal for Black Friday amidst a bevy of offers from wireless carriers aimed at post-Thanksgiving shoppers.

Under T-Mobile’s deal, new or existing customers who trade in a fully-paid off recent smartphone can get a free iPhone 7 with 32 gigabytes of storage. Customers have to stay with T-Mobile for two years on its new unlimited plan, called T-Mobile One, or a Simple Choice plan to get full credit for the free phone.

Alternatively, the free with trade-in deal, which T-Mobile offered when the iPhone 7 first came out in September, can be used to get a free Samsung Galaxy S7 or LG V20.

Wireless carriers are upping the ante on deals and promotions as the holiday shopping season gets going. The aim is to attract more customers in a market that is no longer expanding like it did a few years ago. Only T-Mobile and Sprint added regular monthly phone customers recently, while Verizon and AT&T saw net losses in that most lucrative subscriber category.

Sprint has said it will offer Black Friday customers who buy a Galaxy S7 phone a second S7 phone for free. Or a Galaxy S7 buyer can get a free Samsung Tab E tablet. The HTC Bolt phone will be half off and customers who buy an LG V20 will get a free 43-inch LG 4K UHD Smart LED TV.

T-Mobile tmus is also discounting accessories like wireless speakers and phone power recharging packs. New customers who are switching from a competitor will get an additional $200 per line on a prepaid Mastercard. However, T-Mobile won’t extend to Black Friday its deal that lets customers sign up for 4 unlimited lines for the price of 2, which expires on Tuesday night.

Verizon is offering Black Friday discounts on Google’s new Pixel phone, as it is the only carrier selling the phone directly under an exclusive deal. Customers can get $200 off the Pixel, which sells for $650, or pay $10 a month for 24 months. Verizon will also sell the new Google Home smart device for $100, down from $130.

AT&T’s deals, which started on Tuesday, include a free iPhone 7, Galaxy S7, LG G5 or LG V20 only for customers of the company’s DirecTV or U-Verse services who switch a line in from a competitor. The carrier is also offering an assortment of discounts on other hardware, such as a $200 Visa gift card with purchase of a Samsung Galaxy S6 phone or an LG G Pad X 10.1 tablet for 99 cents with purchase of a flagship LG phone and a two year contract.

When the iPhone 7 was first released, all four carriers offered a free with trade-in offers. T-Mobile and Sprint s said the offers greatly increased demand compared to sales of last year’s iPhone 6s. AT&T t and Verizon vz said their deals only modestly affected demand.

Analysts think the promotions may have helped sell more iPhones than expected, but Appleaapl won’t reveal actual iPhone sales until January, when it reports results for the final quarter of the year. Even then, the company never discloses how many iPhones were sold just in the United States.

Deutsche Telekom CEO Plays It Cool on T-Mobile US

Deutsche Telekom is ‘not in the mood’ to sell T-Mobile US, its chief executive said on Wednesday, although it is watching for any change in the U.S. regulatory environment under Donald Trump’s administration.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns 65% of T-Mobile US, has twice tried to sell in the past five years. Both attempts foundered on regulatory objections.

Since then T-Mobile has made a turnaround and is growing every quarter, overtaking Sprint as the third-largest wireless operator in the U.S.

T-Mobile US tmus is now almost as big as Deutsche Telekom’s dtegf German business, bringing in 2.156 billion euros in adjusted EBITDA, just below the 2.25 billion Germany generated in the third quarter.

Last month T-Mobile US again raised its forecast for customer additions for the year after adding 969,000 postpaid customers in the third quarter ended Sept. 30, up from 890,000 in the second quarter.

Analysts have suggested T-Mobile US is Deutsche Telekom’s only opportunity to grow.

“We are now open to how we could create something beyond our execution, which is creating value,” Hoettges said.

T-Mobile Adds Free Video Streaming

Repeating what he told investors last week at Deutsche Telekom’s third-quarter earnings but using stronger language, Hoettges said he was hoping the political landscape would change and make a deal possible.

“We compare a lot of variables. With Trump, the regulatory environment might change. Everybody is expecting this. At least the chance is bigger then it was under the Democrats,” he said.

“All of this is helping us to be open and try to improve our situation. I am not afraid about whether a (pure) mobile player can survive in this environment. If there are any options, we are going to consider,” Hoettges said.

Shares in T-Mobile US hit an all-time high last week as investors saw a greater chance of an acquisition being approved under the Trump administration due to take office early next year.

Where Mobile Customers Are Seeing Bigger Discounts Right Now

The mobile industry may be entering a new and even more competitive phase as the carriers begin to battle over holiday promotional offers.

The trend towards better offers for consumers started with this year’s new iPhone 7. T-Mobile offered a much better deal than it had the year before, giving customers a free iPhone 7 with a trade-in of a one- or two-year-old iPhone. The other three major carriers quickly copied the free with trade-in offer, and most of them saw a significant jump in iPhone 7 sales compared to last year’s iPhone 6S.

Now with the holiday shopping season approaching, consumers can look forward to another round of deeper discounts.

And again, T-Mobile tmus got the ball rolling with several promotional offers on Wednesday. Under one deal, new or existing customers can get four lines on T-Mobile’s new unlimited data plan for the price of two lines. Customers on older Simple Choice plans can also get the four for the price of two deal. And the discount doesn’t expire.

“When you switch to @TMobile, you keep that promotional pricing… FOR LIFE!! AKA – it’s time to switch!,” CEO John Legere tweeted.

T-Mobile’s unlimited plan, which automatically reduces the quality of streaming video, was introduced in August at a price of $120 for two lines, $140 for three, and $160 for four. Under the new promotion, four lines cost $120 a month. The carrier also announced deals on a range of devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 phone and the UE Boom 2 wireless speaker.

The discounts come as growth is slowing more than ever in the mobile market, where there are already more active phones than the total population of the country. Over the past year, the industry has increased the number of regular monthly phone customers by less than 2%, analyst Craig Moffett has noted. Revenue from monthly service fees has been shrinking for the past two years, though less profitable revenue from selling phones directly to consumers has offset that decline, according to Moffett.

So far, the other carriers have yet to react to T-Mobile’s cheaper service promotion. Sprint s has unveiled some device discounts, such as an offer to get a free Galaxy S7 with purchase of one at full price. But they are likely to counter T-Mobile, particularly Sprint, if the offer catches on, analysts said. AT&Tt and Verizonverizon have tried to stay out of the discounting wars as much as possible.

“I don’t know that we’ll see all the carriers do this, but Sprint might well jump on board,” Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, says. The deep discounts on monthly plans could come back to haunt the industry, however.

“They will never make money from these free lines,” Dawson says. “Hardware discounts can be a way to secure new paying subscribers. The bet is presumably that those lines can be upsold over time, but there’s no guarantee.”